Koko Black Refines Business Processes for Growth

Chocolate Retailer Koko Black Refines Business Processes for Growth

Gourmet chocolatier Koko Black uses only the finest ingredients—from Belgian-sourced chocolate to local delicacies like Tasmanian leatherwood honey—making it renowned as a high-quality product. As it grew from humble origins to employing more than 350 people Australia-wide, the business needed a sophisticated solution to replace inefficient manual processes and support a focus on online sales.

Ecommerce soars: Since changing the business model to focus more on ecommerce channels, Koko Black has enjoyed 600% growth in online sales. This has led to the creation of new product lines, such as its locally-sourced Australian Native collection and partnerships with other premium brands like Penfolds.

Reboot needed: Koko Black struggled to unify management of disparate business units. Its previous solution, MYOB, didn’t allow integrations between its other systems, including retail stores POS, an online sales platform, CRM, payroll, freight aggregation, inventory management, WMS, and demand and supply planning. This meant the business couldn’t manage profitability efficiently, as it only had visibility of sales volumes and margins on a monthly basis, as part of its month end close. The data was stuck in spreadsheets and only revealed total sales volumes at a channel level. Koko Black wanted visibility of margins at a product category level and at a SKU level to ensure it could make informed decisions quickly and confidently.

Complete unification: Koko Black embarked on a total system and process overhaul. With NetSuite, the team integrated procurement, inventory management, POS systems and other functions into a single system with a single database. Business leaders are now able to track the profitability on every unit sold in real time and refine decision-making at a granular level.

The power to improvise: When national shutdowns forced Koko Black to temporarily shut all stores, the team was able to successfully switch to an online model quickly and efficiently. The team is now looking to take Koko Black international with full confidence that their back-end systems can support the growth.